Excellent book. Brilliant characters and really brought that era to life. I would highly recommend this book.

I really wanted to like this book but the author's writing style was very off=putting. The choppy, incomplete sentences were grating and I eventually put the book down. Since I did not finish the book, I do not intend to publish a review.

"Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one."

…or did she?

I adored ‘See What I Have Done’, and would give it 6 stars if I could! I never realised that the Fall River Axe Murders were subject to such continued speculation in popular culture: films, TV movies, books, a short story by Angela Carter…..

Don’t expect a police procedural – in the aftermath of the crime, the police are bumbling fools who compromise the evidence at every turn, and the murders take up little space. In fact, it may be useful to check out the bare bones of the story first; then you can let the prose sweep you along.

The good thing is that this means that those of us who are squeamish need not worry: the author’s focus is not on blood and gore, rather on depicting the rising pressure-cooker of family life in a small community, the psychology of a controlling father, interloping step-mother and two sisters, too close for the comfort of either, with their downtrodden maid, the looker on who sees a great deal of the game.

The writing is poetic, appealing to all our senses. Fingers are ‘wintertwig’, a ring sits ‘like the sun’, while olfactory images abound on every page: hair smells of butter; air smells of blood ‘honey-sweet’ or is ‘kerosene’.

If you enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’, you'll love this novel. I cannot believe that this consummate work of fiction is, in the publisher's words, an "unforgettable debut". Unforgettable, yes. A debut novel, surely not.

'See what I have done' is a fascinating and engrossing read. A factionalized account of the real-life Lizzie Borden case, Schmidt takes us inside the minds of some of the major players in the events of that infamous day. Schmidt does an excellent job bringing to life the events that happened over a hundred years ago. The case still fascinates, probably because of the mystery that still surrounds what actually happened that day. Was Lizzie guilty? Was she capable of committing such horrific crimes? If she didn't do it, then who did? 'See what I have done' imagines one quite plausible version of how the events played out. Recommended.

Thank you to Net Galley and Grove Atlantic for the e-ARC in exchange for my honest review. Many know that I've long been obsessed with the Lizzie Borden story. I've read literally everything written on it, and even spent a night in the Bed and Breakfast that was the Borden home. I crossed my fingers AND toes hoping to get an advance of this one, just because I didn't want to wait. That said, I was initially having a difficult time with this book, because it wasn't matching the history as I knew it, and I kept getting tripped up. I then let that go, decided just to enjoy the writing and ended up liking it a great deal. This title has a very surreal, dreamy quality about the writing. Engrossing, and it thrills me to see this mystery still trendy, even today, so many years later.

This is a look at the famous Lizzie Borden murder case of 1892. There have been so many books written about this case, I wasn’t sure Schmidt would have anything new to add, and while the information about the crime is the same, she provides incredible detail and some interesting insight into the Borden family and their maid